The green dot in the S column says the package is installed. libncurses5-dev isn't installed. Install it with:

host$ sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev

And now your make should work.

byobu - A Screen Manager

For years Unix has had screen which is a screen manager. byobu is wrapper for screen that puts a nice face on it. You can run byobu on your host computer and on the Beagle. With byobu you can start a long running program (bitbake for example) in one terminal and detach from the terminal and the program will keeping running in the background. Using byobu you can later attach to the program (possibly from another terminal) and see how the program is progressing.

You'll see a command prompt. You'll also see some status information on the bottom two lines. Type Ctrl-A ? for help. Type Ctrl-A Ctrl-D to detach from the session. Running byobu again will reattach you to the session. Try running byobu in two windows at the same time. You should see the same session in both.

Hmmm.... I had to reinstall and it doesn't seem to be working now.

Finding what opkg installed

Once you've run opkg, how do you know what's been installed? Take a look in /var/lib/opkg/info or /usr/lib/opkg/info. The files that end in .list contain a list of what's been installed.

Backing up an SD card with dd

Here's the command I use to backup an SD card. I use System:Administration:Disk Utility to figure out the path to the card. In this case it's /dev/sdc

The script makes a backup of the updates file and replaces it with links to our mirror. The $DISTRIB_CODENAME is replaced by whatever distro you are running (eg. lucid, maverick, natty etc.). I wish I could take credit for it, but it was a joint effort with Mike McLeish :-)

Notepad++

Set up on the BeagleBoard

Setup stuff on github

If you've cloned the course github site ([EBC Exercise 05 Getting Exercise Support Materials]]) you will find set up things in exercises/setup. install.sh is a list of various things I to to a fresh SD card to 'move in'. For example, the bone will mount a filesystem on the host computer if it's connected via USB. You can turn this off and have the eithernet over USB run at boot time with:

Installing Ubuntu

The first link references a Ubuntu wiki which details how to install a netbook edition of Ubuntu on ARM/OMAP processor-based systems. It is not beagle-specific. This image runs a little slowly, but not much slower than the SPEd image.

The second link references instructions for installing another image. This image is very minimal, and doesn't have a gui. There are instructions for installing a gui, which I did, with good success. As far as I can tell, even with the gui, this is the fastest image so far.

Installing Always Innovating's Super Jumbo

Always Innovating works with branded products and services companies that are looking to deliver great touch devices as part of their offerings. They have published a free SD card image for the BeagleBoard that runs Angstrom, Android, Ubuntu, and ChromiumOS. Here's a video showing what it can do.

I've put a copy of the compressed image on my DFS site. Feal free to play with it. Here's a wiki that shows how to switch between OS's on the fly.

Resizing an SD card partition via the Beagle

The following is a slick way to boot the Beagle so it isn't using the SD, then repartition the SD card. It came from [2]

Jason Kridner says ...
I got a related question from Mark about how to perform the partition
resizing, so I figured I'd address that here. I don't believe you'd
be able to resize a mounted partition and that this operation would
require another file system to mount. Because this image does not
have the ramdisk, I downloaded the one used being shipped with the xM
boards today [3].

Sharing Laptop Internet Connection with BeagleBoard

Using u-boot to specify a MAC address at boot

The BeagleBoard has a problem where Linux will randomly select a MAC address at boot. In order to get around this, one blogger provides a patch to enable a kernel command line parameter to set a MAC address. Below is one way to apply, your mileage may vary.

Make sure your kernel compiles and boots.

Grab the patch, and open it with gedit

Open .../git/drivers/net/usb/smsc95xx.c

Go to line 64-ish, and look for a place to insert the first code with plus signs preceding each line. Remove the plus signs.

Go to 656-ish, and repeat for the other block of code.

Save and re-compile.

Install the new kernel as normal.

Edit the kernel command line. There are two ways to do this:

Edit the uBoot source and recompile

Go to u-boot, and edit ../include/configs/omap3_beagle.h

Change mmcargs, nandargs, and ramargs to include a parameter for "ethaddr=...", where ... is your MAC address.

Rename an External Storage Device

I ran out of space on my Linux (Ubuntu) partition, so I opted to do all my development on an external hard drive. This works just fine, except that the drive is labeled "Expansion Drive" and the space in there causes problems in some of the setup scripts. It is possible to add an entry in /etc/fstab that mounts the device with a certain name, but this is very cumbersome, for many reasons. Instead, I used this [1] very helpful guide to change the label on my external drive.

Setup a USB Wireless Device on Beagle

The device I used to setup a wireless connection on the Beagle Board was the Linksys Compact Wireless-G USB Network Adapter with SpeedBooster.

I first opened the wpa_supplicant.conf file to setup my networks:

beagle$ cd /etc
beagle$ gedit wpa_supplicant.conf &

This file is filled with numerous examples of possible wireless configurations for you to basically fill in. After looking at the examples, I scrolled down to the bottom of the page and set up two networks: one for home and one for school. Here are examples of my setup networks:

For the network examples above,the quotation marks actually belong there but replace the Your.... areas with your corresponding information. No <space> before the first quotation mark.When finished editing save and exit this file.
The information for the RHIT school network was found here:RHLUG

Now you must specify that this is the file to use for the wireless device:

beagle$ cd network
beagle$ gedit interfaces &

This file will display all of the different types of Internet connections you have setup.
To use the wpa_supplicant.conf file, scroll down to around line 42 of the code and uncomment the configuration for wpasupplicant. After doing this make sure all of the above lines mentioning anything about wlan0 are commented out. Return back to where it says "iface wlan0 inet dhcp" that you uncommented around line 42.
Add "auto wlan0" above this line, make sure the line "wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf" is uncommented below the iface line, and change the wpa-driver line below that line to wext. So after all of that the code in this file for the wireless device should be the following:

NOTE: the auto wlan0 command in this file means that this device will load at boot time. You can take the time in here now to comment out any interfaces you don't use like auto usb0 to make these devices not load at boot time, which will increase the speed at which you boot up.
Save and exit this file

Once you have finished this you can either restart the Beagle Board or:

beagle$ cd
beagle$ /etc/init.d/networking restart

I've found that a lot of the time the interface doesn't receive an IP address when it boots up. If you run ifconfig in the terminal you should see your wireless device connected to a network. If it is connected but no IP address I do the following:

beagle$ ifdown wlan0
# it will report messages here and then
beagle$ ifup wlan0
# more messages and it should report connecting and having an IP address

This ifdown ifup method has worked every time for me so far but if anyone can find a way to prevent having to do this almost every time please feel free to edit this

Run this git command to get access to this repository. (It took about 2 minutes at 6:20am.) Line 21 shows the hash tag for the build.

ANGSTROM_REPO_ID=24805033b1205acc35f8b4d75cc42f8b9c2a1b38

If we pull from this tag we will have the same files as were used to generate the SD image. So do the following

host$ git checkout 24805033b1205acc35f8b4d75cc42f8b9c2a1b38

This takes about 10 seconds.

Fixing Problems

Kernel Boot Problems

Here is a link with some suggestions of what to do if your kernel isn't booting properly.

Serial port garbage

If you are having trouble with garbage on the console, this might help. Sometimes the serial port times out. Most of the time it just generates some junk which can be cleared with CTRL-U or backspace. However, if it happens at the login prompt then getty thinks the terminal is 7-bit with parity (rather than 8-bit raw). If this happens and you continue to login the whole session appears to be scrambled - if you press CTRL-D you can login again provided you don't stop typing... :]
I have simply added the following two lines to root's .profile: